Individual Tutoring in Academic Success and Legal Methods

Tom offers individual tutoring to pre-law and first-year law students seeking to improve their academic performance. Tom helps students with skill building. While law schools focus on teaching legal doctrine, simply knowing legal rules is not the core of lawyering, nor is it the core of success in law school. The core of lawyering is applying legal rules to novel fact situations. While law school exams test that skill, professors frequently don’t teach that skill. Tom helps students bridge the often confusing transition from learning legal rules in isolation to synthesizing and applying a coherent body of law—the very thing that exams test, especially first-year exams.

Tom offers individual tutoring to students on how to do the following:

Read and brief cases

Analyze and develop facts

Construct arguments

Outline courses

Prepare for and write exams

Tom is patient, kind, and supportive. He recognizes that students’ mistakes arise from lack of experience and training, not from lack of capacity. To provide students with training and experience, Tom works students methodically through analytical problems, teaching the analytical process that students can apply in exams and in practice. This allows students to be active learners, rather than passive recipients of information. Lawyers are active problem solvers; thus, Tom’s individual tutoring and teaching mirror that process.

While Tom will help students do their work better, Tom will not do any students’ work for them. Students must warrant in writing that the help they seek is permitted by their school’s rules of student conduct.